OpenSUSE Rolling Out Retpoline Support, Xen Spectre/Meltdown Mitigation

SUSE's Richard Brown has issued a status update around openSUSE's ongoing mitigation of the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities.

The big piece of news is openSUSE is rolling out Spectre V2 mitigation soon using Retpolines rather than their current microcode approach where they ended up pulling that anyhow in light of the Intel CPU microcode troubles recently reported of reboots, etc.

They will soon be rolling out the Retpoline-ized kernel with full mitigation protection -- including the necessary GCC kernel patches. For openSUSE Leap running off the older GCC 4.8 compiler as found in SLES, they have already backported the Retpoline code to the vintage GCC 4.8 compiler.

OpenSUSE is also preparing to roll out Xen updates for mitigating both Spectre and Meltdown on their side.

OpenSUSE users can find out the latest status via news.opensuse.org.